Time to say Adieu to Agile

Written by Andy Lahy, Global Head of Logistics Strategy and Innovation at Panalpina.

First of all, our apologies to
those of you out there that are strong advocates of Lean, Agile, Six Sigma,
Shingo or any other approach that promises to bring continuous improvement or a
new culture or transformation to your business.

Please excuse our cynicism, but
we´ve seen enough articles on Linkedin about how Lean is a philosophy and not a
tool-kit, how Agile promises to improve businesses where Lean has failed, and
how Six Sigma, if only it was done correctly and embraced by senior managers,
would transform the world.

We call for an end to
the debate about the right approach to
continuous improvement. Instead, let us seek to understand the fundamentals of how
people work together to make things better. It is this understanding that
really sits at the heart of any journey towards operational excellence.

Our view is that humans have a natural ability to work together to improve things. In fact, one could argue that working together and improving things is in our DNA. Our world as we know it wouldn´t be here if this weren’t the case, and we are pretty sure it wasn´t all down to Lean or Agile!

The core of our argument is that there
are more similarities between the many popular approaches such as Lean, Agile, Six
Sigma and Shingo, than there are differences, and that any business that
blindly sticks to one approach will restrict rather than enable continuous
improvement.

Building on the ideas of Dahlgaard
and Dahlgaard-Park (1999), operational excellence is about

developing
excellent people, who are able to

create
excellent partnerships with customers, suppliers and wider society, to

deliver
excellent products or services that

delight
customers.

There are clearly multiple ways this can be done. For some, the answer is to look to introduce a “lean approach” or to implement an “agile approach”, or for those that prefer to sit on the fence, the “le-agile approach” is needed. But, in line with the ideas of Professor Mike Wilson, global head of Logistics and Manufacturing at Panalpina, continuous improvement and operational excellence are simply all about winning the hearts and minds of people.

The question to be answered by businesses therefore, is not what is the right continuous improvement approach, but instead, how can we create an approach that enables and engages everyone in the business to want to work together to make improvements?

So, if we advise against using Lean,
Agile, Six -Sigma, Shingo or any other off the shelf approaches to do this, what
do we recommend exactly to create a culture of continuous improvement?

Simply, we recommend to start by asking
yourself what you want to achieve, who the involved people are, both in terms
of who will be affected by the change and who will need to work together to make
the change. Only when you have this, explore different elements of the existing
approaches and select the most appropriate elements from each and bring them
together to create an approach that is right for you and the people involved.

This is exactly the approach we used at Panalpina, when we developed our approach to operational excellence. We worked with employees from across the business to take the best from the different approaches, mixed them in with ideas developed by our own team, and created LogEx, an approach that works for us and our customers. Eight years on, LogEx is still going strong and we continue to improve it.

In short, if you want to create a
culture of continuous improvement, don´t start by selecting any single approach
and blindly try to apply it. Use a pick and mix approach and continuously
improve your own continuous improvement approach. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s
Juliet, an improvement approach by any name, will work just as well.